19 aprile 2018: Thomas Sattig: Part, Slot, Ground: New Foundations for Aristotelian Mereologies
OMS: OntoforMat Metaphysical Seminar - Spring 2018
Thomas Sattig (University of Tuebingen)
Part, Slot, Ground: New Foundations for Aristotelian Mereologies
19 aprile 2018, h. 14:30-16:30
Sala Enzo Paci, Direzione del Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Milano.
Abstract:
It is a vivid Aristotelian idea that a material object is structured by a certain arrangement of mereological slots, and that the fillers of these slots are the object’s parts. But what are mereological slots? What is a slot-structure? And what does it take to fill a slot in such a structure? The tradition in mereology is replete with appeals to an object’s mereological structure, its part-carving form, but it offers little analysis of these elusive notions. The aim of this talk is to explore novel reductive foundations of mereological slot-structures of material objects, and thereby to contribute to lifting these Aristotelian ideas from the obscurity that has barred them from breaking into mainstream contemporary metaphysics.
In the first part, I shall sketch an intuitive and familiar picture of a material object’s slot-structure. In the second part, I shall present a metaphysical analysis of the mereological slots of a material object in terms of the grounds of the object’s essential kind. Moreover, I shall indicate how this analysis allows for the slot-structure of a material object a) to vary, b) to be hierarchical, and c) to exhibit a bottom-up or a top-down order of dependence. In the third part, I shall illustrate the explanatory power of the analysis by applying it to some classical Aristotelian cases.
La conferenza si terrà in inglese.
La partecipazione alla conferenza è fortemente consigliata agli allievi della Scuola di Dottorato in Filosofia e Scienze dell’Uomo.
Tutti gli interessati sono invitati a partecipare.
Per ulteriori informazioni: valerio.buonomo@unimi.it
Organization committee: Valerio Buonomo, Paolo Valore